Reinventing the opera with Pauline (with video)

Author Margaret Atwood and composer Tobin Stokes bring CanLit star back to life

City Opera Vancouver is presenting Pauline, a chamber opera based on the life and final days of Canadian writer, poet, and actress Pauline Johnson. The music for Pauline has been written by Tobin Stokes, and the libretto by Margaret Atwood.

Contemporary opera has morphed into one of the hottest 21st-century music commodities, and Vancouver into a place where new opera gets more than cursory attention. This month sees the premiere of City Opera Vancouver’s Pauline at the restored York Theatre, a new work about poetess of yore Pauline Johnson, with a score by Tobin Stokes and a libretto by literary icon Margaret Atwood.

Johnson (1861-1913) was one of the most recognizable stars of early CanLit, a charismatic figure who straddled Colonial and First Nations cultures.

“She was in the school reader,” Atwood explained during a recent phone interview with The Vancouver Sun. “Then she dropped out of the canon until 1983, when I put her back into the New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English.”

The opera begins in 1913, at the end of Johnson’s life in Vancouver just before the First World War. She is dying from cancer and remembering her complicated, conflicted life, torn between her identities as Mohawk and white. As her doctor tries to deal with her pain, her sister Eva has her own ideas about the truths of Johnson’s life and career.

Pauline, the opera, started out as a project of the Canadian Opera Company, an outfit which had already tried out the literary librettist idea with Randolph Peter’s 1999 production The Golden Ass, featuring a text by the grand old man of Canadian letters, Robertson Davies, and a notorious $1.8-million budget.

Atwood was quoted by the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper as saying, “(Johnson) had courage, brains and beauty, like many of the best operatic heroines. She also led a double life, in which a secret love, a jealous sister and an early death were elements.”

But Pauline version 1.0 didn’t pan out as anticipated. First the composer backed out. Then COC general director Richard Bradshaw, who had championed the project, died suddenly in 2007.

City Opera Vancouver’s Charles Barber saw an opportunity to mount the work on a significantly smaller scale than originally envisioned. As Atwood explained, “This story takes place in Vancouver. We took the full-scale libretto and cut it down in terms of length and numbers of characters, and I think it’s actually better this way.”

Victoria-based composer Tobin Stokes was called in to do the music. New opera has been a career focus for Stokes in recent years, but there was to be a rather tight timeline for Pauline.

“I first got a call to write music for one aria, about 2½ years ago. Then I wrote music for act one, and we tried that out,” Stokes said. “I went away, fixed some things, I wrote act two, and we workshopped that. It was pretty tight, finding time to workshop and get feedback, and revise.”

Stokes found the idea of a Pauline opera full of contemporary resonance. “It’s very Canadian because she had one foot in each country, but of course we see this all over the world as well. Geographically, it’s very Canadian — she went back and forth across the country by train, connecting with people in tiny communities. Her poetry is mixed in with Atwood’s libretto, and it’s very hard to separate out what is Pauline’s poetry and what is Atwood’s.”

These days the logistics of creating an opera amount to something of an art in themselves, especially what’s known in the biz as workshopping. Atwood’s take is instructive: “I really don’t see much that is new in the workshopping process. People have been workshopping things for a long time, only it used to be called rehearsal.”

Stokes has become an old hand at the practice.

“In workshopping, you start to really understand the pacing of the journey undertaken by each character,” he said. “We had a complete run-through with an audience at the Carnegie Centre, with people who didn’t know anything about opera and people who knew a whole lot about opera. Some of the feedback was pretty brutal, which is fine.”

A definite plus of the Pauline creative team is Atwood’s engagement with opera: She’s a long-term opera fan.

“I didn’t feel I needed to write an opera,” she said. “But it’s somewhat perverse that we do the old classics again and again. A form is not alive unless people are still using it to say new things. These days the creativity in opera seems to go into the production, and the choice to do something people haven’t seen very often. What knocked opera out of the centre of our culture was film and radio and television, but also just the advent of modern music, which many people find screechy and unbearable.”

In bringing Pauline Johnson back from what many modernist critics considered a well-deserved eclipse, Atwood is making a point about how we see the arts, not to mention how we see culture and class.

“A lot of what happened to the arts in the early 20th century is that they began being called ‘the arts.’ The novel, through much of the 19th century, wasn’t considered art — it was lowbrow entertainment, popular trash. If you sang opera, or were an actress, it was the next thing to being a prostitute. The kind of dramatic recitation that Pauline gave was next door to being an actress, and she had to struggle to remain respectable.”

Opera insiders are well aware that the composer/librettist relationship is delicate and fraught with complications. How did Stokes feel about working with one of Canada’s literary superheroes?

“Atwood’s renown and experience had nothing to do with it,” he said. “It was all how the libretto was working. She said, ‘Here it is, it’s a skeleton, do what you have to do.’ She was always open to supplying new material or making cuts. She managed to stay detached, and to respect the process and the people involved.”

“It’s exactly like working in any other form,” Atwood said. “When you are working on a television script, you know it is not a novel. Words can be set to music in any number of ways, but language is elastic and can be stretched out slowly, or made to go by very quickly, like in Gilbert & Sullivan patter songs. I’m not a composer, but I did have an alternative version in my head to which I could compare the reality of what emerged.”

There was certainly some give and take with both composer and producer. Ultimately, new opera is necessarily a team proposition. “It’s group creation, which goes on all the time in any number of ways.”

As far as describing the new music Stokes created for Pauline, the composer said, “It’s new music, but that doesn’t really define anything these days. I think I’m a lyrical writer, but I try to stay true to the libretto. Everything is drawn from the words. I never try to pile complexity on top of the words, I try to supply it musically where the words demand it. I’m always looking for simplicity — simple lyrical melodies that I hope the average listener will appreciate.”

And is Margaret Atwood adding the new title of librettist to her other endeavours?

“Will I write another opera?” she asked. “I never make predictions of that kind. You never know what you might wind up doing. I would certainly go around the block for Charles Barber, who works very hard at making opera accessible.”

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